Getting it wrong in "The Lady of Shalott"

Victorian Poetry, Spring, 2009 by Erik Gray

   Then some one said, 'We will return no more;'
   And all at once they sang, 'Our island home
   Is far beyond the wave; we will no longer roam.' (ll. 43-45)

"All at once" carries the double sense of "suddenly" and "in unison," and both meanings are paradoxical. Having become nearly catatonic in the previous stanzas, the mariners suddenly perk up at the idea that their lassitude might be permanent. Likewise, they embrace the prospect of being able to care each man for himself, rather than working towards the common good, and yet they express this egoism by beginning to chant all together. The whole rest of the poem consists of their "Choric Song," which we must imagine them to be somehow extemporizing in unison. But the paradox of choosing to improvise collectively is appropriate not only to lotos-eating, but to Tennyson's very conception of "song" or poetic composition. Both imply a relinquishing of the individual will; and yet such relinquishing itself requires a forceful act of volition, since the power to which one is submitting is known to be imperfect.

Hence as the Choric Song progresses, its rhythms move from utter languor to vigorous determination, until by the end the meter has settled into a regular drumbeat. The final change of rhythm is introduced in the following lines:

   We have had enough of action, and of motion we,
   Rolled to starboard, rolled to larboard, where the surge was
   seething free,
   Where the wallowing monster spouted his foam-fountains in the sea.
   Let us swear an oath, and keep it with an equal mind,
   In the hollow Lotos-land to live and lie reclined
   On the hills like Gods together, careless of mankind. (ll. 150-155)

The notion of men binding themselves by oath to relinquish responsibility resembles the paradox of people joining together to extemporize. But the sense of conscious commitment is necessary, because living in Lotos-land, like extemporizing--and like all composition, in Tennyson's view--requires that one be knowingly "careless." The state to which the mariners aspire is one of fault, not default. It needs willpower to begin, because one is committing oneself to being as mistaken as the Lucretian gods that the poem goes on to describe.

It is notable that "Oenone" and "The Lotos-Eaters," originally published in 1832, were both heavily revised for their republication ten years later. The final section of the latter, for instance, was entirely rewritten: the lines I have just quoted, and the strident rhythm they introduce, were new in 1842. Tennyson was not in this case responding to reviewers' criticisms--appropriately, since the passage vows to ignore the cries and complaints of humankind--but only to his own sense of what was wrong or wanting in the poem. There is nothing unusual in a poet's revising his or her work, of course, but it seems particularly apt that these two and "The Lady of Shalott" should be the poems Tennyson rewrote most extensively for the new volume, since they are all concerned with conscious error. Of the three "The Lady of Shalott" was the most drastically revised. The original version emphasizes, even more than the final one, the clear-sightedness with which the Lady recognizes her own "mischance" in Part IV. A passage omitted in 1842 describes how deliberately she repeats the forbidden action of looking down to Camelot: